-----Original Message-----
From: Arne Klawitter [mailto:arne.klawitter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 1999 2:08 PM
To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Kosova
Hello,
Can someone send me the essays of Chomsky and Zizek again. I had problems
with
my computer and so I lost them.
Thanks, arne
------------------------
AGAINST THE DOUBLE BLACKMAIL
Slavoj Zizek
The top winner in the contest for the greatest blunder of 1998 was a
Latin-American patriotic terrorist who sent a bomb letter to a US consulate
in order to protest against the American interfering into the local
politics. As a conscientious citizen, he wrote on the envelope his return
address; however, he did not put enough stamps on it, so that the post
returned the letter to him. Forgetting what he put in it, he opened it and
blew himself to death - a perfect example of how, ultimately, a letter
always arrives at its destination. And is not something quite similar
happening to the Slobodan Milosevic regime with the recent NATO bombing? It
is interesting to watch in the last days the Serbian satellite state TV
which targets foreign public: no reports on atrocities in Kosovo, refugees
are mentioned only as people fleeing NATO bombing, so that the overall idea
is that Serbia, the island of peace, the only place in ex-Yugoslavia that
was not touched by the war raging all around it, is not irrationally
attacked by the NATO madmen destroying bridges and hospitals... For years,
Milosevic was sending bomb letters to his neighbors, from the Albanians to
Croatia and Bosnia, keeping himself out of the conflict while igniting fire
all around Serbia - finally, his last letter returned to him. Let us hope
that the result of the NATO intervention will be that Milosevic will be
proclaimed the political blunderer of the year.
And there is a kind of poetic justice in the fact that the West
finally intervened apropos of Kosovo - let us not forget that it was there
that it
all began with the ascension to power of Milosevic: this ascension was
legitimized by the promise to amend the underprivileged situation of Serbia
within the Yugoslav federation, especially with regard to the Albanian
"separatism." Albanians were Milosevic's first target; afterwards, he
shifted his wrath onto other Yugoslav republics (Slovenia, Croatia,
Bosnia), until, finally, the focus of the conflict returned to Kosovo - as
in a closed loop of Destiny, the arrow returned to the one who lanced it by
way of setting free the spectre of ethnic passions. This is the key point
worth remembering: Yugoslavia did not start to disintegrate when the
Slovene "secession" triggered the domino-effect (first Croatia, then
Bosnia, Macedonia.); it was already at the moment of Milosevic's
constitutional reforms in 1987, depriving Kosovo and Vojvodina of their
limited autonomy, that the fragile balance on which Yugoslavia rested was
irretrievably disturbed. From that moment onwards, Yugoslavia continued to
live only because it didn't yet notice it was already dead - it was like
the proverbial cat in the cartoons walking over the precipice, floating in
the air, and falling down only when it becomes aware that it has no ground
under its feet. From Milosevic's seizure of power in Serbia onwards, the
only actual chance for Yugoslavia to survive was to reinvent its formula:
either Yugoslavia under Serb domination or some form of radical
decentralization, from a loose confederacy to the full sovereignty of its
units.
It is thus easy to praise the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as the
first case of an intervention - not into the confused situation of a civil
war, but - into a country with full sovereign power. Is it not comforting
to see the NATO forces intervene not for any specific economico-strategic
interests, but simply because a country is cruelly violating the
elementary human rights of an ethnic group? Is not this the only hope in
our global era - to see some internationally acknowledged force as a
guarantee that all countries will respect a certain minimum of ethical
(and, hopefully, also health, social, ecological) standards? However, the
situation is more complex, and this complexity is indicated already in the
way NATO justifies its intervention: the violation of human rights is
always accompanied by the vague, but ominous reference to "strategic
interests." The story of NATO as the enforcer of the respect for human
rights is thus only one of the two coherent stories that can be told about
the recent bombings of Yugoslavia, and the problem is that each story has
its own rationale. The second story concerns the other side of the
much-praised new global ethical politics in which one is allowed to
violate the state sovereignty on behalf of the violation of human rights.
The first glimpse into this other side is provided by the way the big
Western media selectively elevate some local "warlord" or dictator into
the embodiment of Evil: Sadam Hussein, Milosevic, up to the unfortunate
(now forgotten) Aidid in Somalia - at every point, it is or was "the
community of civilized nations against...". And on what criteria does this
selection rely? Why Albanians in Serbia and not also Palestinians in
Israel, Kurds in Turkey, etc.etc? Here, of course, we enter the shady
world of international capital and its strategic interests.
According to the "Project CENSORED," the top censored story of
1998 was that of a half-secret international agreement in working, called
MAI (the Multilateral Agreement on Investment). The primary goal of MAI
will be to protect the foreign interests of multinational companies. The
agreement will basically undermine the sovereignty of nations by assigning
power to the corporations almost equal to those of the countries in which
these corporations are located. Governments will no longer be able to
treat their domestic firms more favorably than foreign firms. Furthermore,
countries that do not relax their environmental, land-use and health and
labor standards to meet the demands of foreign firms may be accused of
acting illegally. Corporations will be able to sue sovereign state if they
will impose too severe ecological or other standards - under NAFTA (which
is the main model for MAI), Ethyl Corporation is already suing Canada for
banning the use of its gasoline additive MMT. The greatest threat is, of
course, to the developing nations which will be pressured into depleting
their natural resources for commercial exploitation. Renato Ruggerio,
director of the World Trade Organization, the sponsor of MAI, is already
hailing this project, elaborated and discussed in a clandestine manner,
with almost no public discussion and media attention, as the "constitution
for a new global economy." And, in the same way in which, already for
Marx, market relations provided the true foundation for the notion of
individual freedoms and rights, THIS is also the obverse of the
much-praised new global morality celebrated even by some neoliberal
philosophers as signalling the beginning of the new era in which
international community will establish and enforce some minimal code
preventing sovereign state to engage in crimes against humanity even
within its own territory. And the recent catastrophic economic situation
in Russia, far from being the heritage of old Socialist mismanagement, is
a direct result of this global capitalist logic embodied in MAI.
This other story also has its ominous military side. The ultimate
lesson of the last American military interventions, from the Operation
Desert Fox against Iraq at the end of 1998 to the present bombing of
Yugoslavia, is that they signal a new era in military history - battles in
which the attacking force operates under the constraint that it can
sustain no casualties. When the first stealth-fighter fell down in Serbia,
the emphasis of the American media was that there were no casualties - the
pilot was SAVED! (This concept of "war without casualties" was elaborated
by General Collin Powell.) And was not the counterpoint to it the almost
surreal way CNN reported on the war: not only was it presented as a TV
event, but the Iraqi themselves seem to treat it this way - during the
day, Bagdad was a "normal" city, with people going around and following
their business, as if war and bombardment was an irreal nightmarish
spectre that occurred only during the night and did not take place in
effective reality?
Let us recall what went on in the final American assault on the
Iraqi lines during the Gulf War: no photos, no reports, just rumours that
tanks with bulldozer like shields in front of them rolled over Iraqi
trenches, simply burying thousands of troops in earth and sand - what went
on was allegedly considered too cruel in its shere mechanical efficiency,
too different from the standard notion of a heroic face to face combat, so
that images would perturb too much the public opinion and a total
censorship black-out was stritly imposed. Here we have the two aspects
joined together: the new notion of war as a purely technological event,
taking place behind radar and computer screens, with no casualties, AND
the extreme physical cruelty too unbearable for the gaze of the media -
not the crippled children and raped women, victims of caricaturized local
ethnic "fundamentalist warlords," but thousands of nameless soldiers,
victims of nameless efficient technological warfare. When Jean Baudrillard
made the claim that the Gulf War did not take place, this statement could
also be read in the sense that such traumatic pictures that stand for the
Real of this war were totally censured...
How, then, are we to think these two stories together, without
sacrificing the truth of each of them? What we have here is a political
example of the famous drawing in which we recognize the contours either of
a rabbit head or of a goose head, depending on our mental focus. If we
look at the situation in a certain way, we see the international community
enforcing minimal human rights standards on a nationalist neo-Communist
leader engaged in ethnic cleansing, ready to ruin his own nation just to
retain power. If we shift the focus, we see NATO, the armed hand of the
new capitalist global order, defending the strategic interests of the
capital in the guise of a disgusting travesty, posing as a disinterested
enforcer of human rights, attacking a sovereign country which, in spite of
the problematic nature of its regime, nonetheless acts as an obstacle to
the unbriddled assertion of the New World Order.
However, what if one should reject this double blackmail (if you
are against NATO strikes, you are for Milosevic's proto-Fascist regime of
ethnic cleansing, and if you are against Milosevic, you support the global
capitalist New World Order)? What if this very opposition between
enlightened international intervention against ethnic fundamentalists, and
the heroic last pockets of resistance against the New World Order, is a
false one? What if phenomena like the Milosevic regime are not the
opposite to the New World Order, but rather its SYMPTOM, the place at
which the hidden TRUTH of the New World Order emerges? Recently, one of
the American negotiators said that Milosevic is not only part of the
problem, but rather THE problem itself. However, was this not clear FROM
THE VERY BEGINNING? Why, then, the interminable procrastination of the
Western powers, playing for years into Milosevic's hands, acknowledging
him as a key factor of stability in the region, misreading clear cases of
Serb aggression as civil or even tribal warfare, initially putting the
blame on those who immediately saw what Milosevic stands for and, for that
reason, desperately wanted to escape his grasp (see James Baker's public
endorsement of a "limited military intervention" against Slovene
secession), supporting the last Yugoslav prime minister Ante Markovic,
whose program was, in an incredible case of political blindness, seriously
considered as the last chance for a democratic market-oriented unified
Yugoslavia, etc.etc.? When the West fights Milosevic, it is NOT fighting
its enemy, one of the last points of resistance against the
liberal-democratic New World Order; it is rather fighting its own
creature, a monster that grew as the result of the compromises and
inconsistencies of the Western politics itself. (And, incidentally, it is
the same as with Iraq: its strong position is also the result of the
American strategy of containing Iran.)
So, precisely as a Leftist, my answer to the dilemma "Bomb or
not?" is: not yet ENOUGH bombs, and they are TOO LATE. In the last decade,
the West followed a Hamlet-like procrastination towards Balkan, and the
present bombardment has effectively all the signs of Hamlet's final
murderous outburst in which a lot of people unnecessarily die (not only
the King, his true target, but also his mother, Laertius, Hamlet
himelf...), because Hamlet acted too late, when the proper moment was
already missed. So the West, in the present intervention which displays
all the signs of a violent outburst of impotent aggressivity without a
clear political goal, is now paying the price for the years of
entertaining illusions that one can make a deal with Milosevic: with the
recent hesitations about the ground intervention in Kosovo, the Serbian
regime is, under the pretext of war, launching the final assault on Kosovo
and purge it of most of the Albanians, cynically accepting bombardments as
the price to be paid. When the Western forces repeat all the time that
they are not fighting the Serbian people, but only their corrupted regime,
they rely on the typically liberal wrong premise that the Serbian people
are just victims of their evil leadership personified in Milosevic,
manipulated by him. The painful fact is that Serb aggressive nationalism
enjoys the support of the large majority of the population - no, Serbs are
not passive victims of nationalist manipulation, they are not Americans in
disguise, just waiting to be delivered from the bad nationalist spell.
More precisely, the misperception of the West is double: this
notion of the bad leadership manipulating the good people is accompanied
by the apparently contradictory notion according to which, Balkan people
are living in the past, fighting again old battles, perceiving recent
situation through old myths... One is tempted to say that these two
notions should be precisely TURNED AROUND: not only are people not "good,"
since they let themselves be manipulated with obscene pleasure; there are
also no "old myths" which we need to study if we are really to understand
the situation, just the PRESENT outburst of racist nationalism which,
according to its needs, opportunistically resuscitates old myths...
So, on the one hand, we have the obscenities of the Serb state
propaganda: they regularily refer to Clinton not as "the American
president," but as "the American Fuehrer"; two of the transparents on
their state-organized anti-Nato demonstrations were "Clinton, come here
and be our Monica!" (i.e. suck our...), and "Monica, did you suck out also
his brain?". The atmosphere in Belgrade is, at least for the time being,
carnavalesque in a faked way - when they are not in shelters, people dance
to rock or ethnic music on the streets, under the motto "With poetry and
music against bombs!", playing the role of the defying heroes (since they
know that NATO does not really bomb civilian targets and that,
consequently, they are safe!). This is where the NATO planners got it
wrong, caught in their schemes of strategic reasoning, unable to forecast
that the Serb reaction to bombardment will be a recourse to a collective
Bakhtinian carnivalization of the social life... This pseudo-authentic
spectacle, although it may fascinate some confused Leftists, is
effectively the other, public, face of ethnic cleansing: in Belgrade
people are defiantly dancing on the streets while, three hundred
kilometers to the South, a genocide of African proportions is taking
place... And the Western counterpoint to this obscenity is the more and
more openly racist tone of its reporting: when the three American soldiers
were taken prisoners, CNN dedicated the first 10 minutes of the News to
their predicament (although everyone knew that NOTHING will happen to
them!), and only then reported on the tens of thousands of refugees,
burned villages and Pristina turning into a ghost town. Where is the
so-much-praised Serb "democratic opposition" to protest THIS horror taking
place in their own backyard, not only the - till now, at least,
bombardments with relatively very low casualties?
In the recent struggle of the so-called "democratic opposition" in
Serbia against the Milosevic's regime, the truly touchy topic is the
stance towards Kosovo: as to this topic, the large majority of the
"democratic opposition" unconditionally endorses Milosevic's anti-Albanian
nationalist agenda, even accusing him of making compromises with the West
and "betraying" Serb national interests in Kosovo. In the course of the
student demonstrations against the Milosevic's Socialist Party
falsification of the election results in the Winter of 1996, the Western
media who closely followed the events and praised the revived democratic
spirit in Serbia, rarely mentioned the fact that one of the regular
slogans of the demonstrators against the special police forces was
"Instead of kicking us, go to Kosovo and kick out the Albanians!". In
today's Serbia, the absolute sine qua non of an authentic political act
would thus be to unconditionally reject the ideological topos of the
"Albanian threat to Serbia."
One thing is for sure: the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia will
change the global geopolitic coordinates. The unwritten pact of peaceful
coexistence (the respect of each state's full sovereignty, i.e.
non-interference in internal affairs, even in the case of the grave
violation of human rights) is over. However, the very first act of the new
global police force usurping the right to punish sovereign states for
their wrongdoings already signals its end, its own undermining, since it
immediately became clear that this universality of human rights as its
legitimization is false, i.e. that the attacks on selective targets
protect particular interests. The NATO bombardments of Yugoslavia also
signal the end of any serious role of UN and Security Council: it is NATO
under US guidance that effectively pulls the strings. Furthermore, the
silent pact with Russia that held till now is broken: in the terms of this
pact, Russia was publicly treated as a superpower, allowed to maintain the
appearance of being one, on condition that it did not effectively act as
one. Now Russia's humiliation is open, any pretense of dignity is
unmasked: Russia can only openly resist or openly comply with Western
pressure. The further logical result of this new situation will be, of
course, the renewed rise of anti-Western resistance from Eastern Europe to
the Third World, with the sad consequence that criminal figures like
Milosevic will be elevated into the model fighters against the New World
Order.
So the lesson is that the alternative between the New World Order
and the neoracist nationalists opposing it is a false one: these are the
two sides of the same coin - the New World Order itself breeds
monstrosities that it fights. Which is why the protests against bombing
from the reformed Communist parties all around Europe, inclusive of PDS,
are totally misdirected: these false protesters against the NATO
bombardment of Serbia are like the caricaturized pseudo-Leftists who
oppose the trial against a drug dealer, claiming that his crime is the
result of social pathology of the capitalist system. The way to fight the
capitalist New World Order is not by supporting local proto-Fascist
resistances to it, but to focus on the only serious question today: how to
build TRANSNATIONAL political movements and institutions strong enough to
seriously constraint the unlimited rule of the capital, and to render
visible and politically relevant the fact that the local fundamentalist
resistances against the New World Order, from Milosevic to le Pen and the
extreme Right in Europe, are part of it?
From: Arne Klawitter [mailto:arne.klawitter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 1999 2:08 PM
To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Kosova
Hello,
Can someone send me the essays of Chomsky and Zizek again. I had problems
with
my computer and so I lost them.
Thanks, arne
------------------------
AGAINST THE DOUBLE BLACKMAIL
Slavoj Zizek
The top winner in the contest for the greatest blunder of 1998 was a
Latin-American patriotic terrorist who sent a bomb letter to a US consulate
in order to protest against the American interfering into the local
politics. As a conscientious citizen, he wrote on the envelope his return
address; however, he did not put enough stamps on it, so that the post
returned the letter to him. Forgetting what he put in it, he opened it and
blew himself to death - a perfect example of how, ultimately, a letter
always arrives at its destination. And is not something quite similar
happening to the Slobodan Milosevic regime with the recent NATO bombing? It
is interesting to watch in the last days the Serbian satellite state TV
which targets foreign public: no reports on atrocities in Kosovo, refugees
are mentioned only as people fleeing NATO bombing, so that the overall idea
is that Serbia, the island of peace, the only place in ex-Yugoslavia that
was not touched by the war raging all around it, is not irrationally
attacked by the NATO madmen destroying bridges and hospitals... For years,
Milosevic was sending bomb letters to his neighbors, from the Albanians to
Croatia and Bosnia, keeping himself out of the conflict while igniting fire
all around Serbia - finally, his last letter returned to him. Let us hope
that the result of the NATO intervention will be that Milosevic will be
proclaimed the political blunderer of the year.
And there is a kind of poetic justice in the fact that the West
finally intervened apropos of Kosovo - let us not forget that it was there
that it
all began with the ascension to power of Milosevic: this ascension was
legitimized by the promise to amend the underprivileged situation of Serbia
within the Yugoslav federation, especially with regard to the Albanian
"separatism." Albanians were Milosevic's first target; afterwards, he
shifted his wrath onto other Yugoslav republics (Slovenia, Croatia,
Bosnia), until, finally, the focus of the conflict returned to Kosovo - as
in a closed loop of Destiny, the arrow returned to the one who lanced it by
way of setting free the spectre of ethnic passions. This is the key point
worth remembering: Yugoslavia did not start to disintegrate when the
Slovene "secession" triggered the domino-effect (first Croatia, then
Bosnia, Macedonia.); it was already at the moment of Milosevic's
constitutional reforms in 1987, depriving Kosovo and Vojvodina of their
limited autonomy, that the fragile balance on which Yugoslavia rested was
irretrievably disturbed. From that moment onwards, Yugoslavia continued to
live only because it didn't yet notice it was already dead - it was like
the proverbial cat in the cartoons walking over the precipice, floating in
the air, and falling down only when it becomes aware that it has no ground
under its feet. From Milosevic's seizure of power in Serbia onwards, the
only actual chance for Yugoslavia to survive was to reinvent its formula:
either Yugoslavia under Serb domination or some form of radical
decentralization, from a loose confederacy to the full sovereignty of its
units.
It is thus easy to praise the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as the
first case of an intervention - not into the confused situation of a civil
war, but - into a country with full sovereign power. Is it not comforting
to see the NATO forces intervene not for any specific economico-strategic
interests, but simply because a country is cruelly violating the
elementary human rights of an ethnic group? Is not this the only hope in
our global era - to see some internationally acknowledged force as a
guarantee that all countries will respect a certain minimum of ethical
(and, hopefully, also health, social, ecological) standards? However, the
situation is more complex, and this complexity is indicated already in the
way NATO justifies its intervention: the violation of human rights is
always accompanied by the vague, but ominous reference to "strategic
interests." The story of NATO as the enforcer of the respect for human
rights is thus only one of the two coherent stories that can be told about
the recent bombings of Yugoslavia, and the problem is that each story has
its own rationale. The second story concerns the other side of the
much-praised new global ethical politics in which one is allowed to
violate the state sovereignty on behalf of the violation of human rights.
The first glimpse into this other side is provided by the way the big
Western media selectively elevate some local "warlord" or dictator into
the embodiment of Evil: Sadam Hussein, Milosevic, up to the unfortunate
(now forgotten) Aidid in Somalia - at every point, it is or was "the
community of civilized nations against...". And on what criteria does this
selection rely? Why Albanians in Serbia and not also Palestinians in
Israel, Kurds in Turkey, etc.etc? Here, of course, we enter the shady
world of international capital and its strategic interests.
According to the "Project CENSORED," the top censored story of
1998 was that of a half-secret international agreement in working, called
MAI (the Multilateral Agreement on Investment). The primary goal of MAI
will be to protect the foreign interests of multinational companies. The
agreement will basically undermine the sovereignty of nations by assigning
power to the corporations almost equal to those of the countries in which
these corporations are located. Governments will no longer be able to
treat their domestic firms more favorably than foreign firms. Furthermore,
countries that do not relax their environmental, land-use and health and
labor standards to meet the demands of foreign firms may be accused of
acting illegally. Corporations will be able to sue sovereign state if they
will impose too severe ecological or other standards - under NAFTA (which
is the main model for MAI), Ethyl Corporation is already suing Canada for
banning the use of its gasoline additive MMT. The greatest threat is, of
course, to the developing nations which will be pressured into depleting
their natural resources for commercial exploitation. Renato Ruggerio,
director of the World Trade Organization, the sponsor of MAI, is already
hailing this project, elaborated and discussed in a clandestine manner,
with almost no public discussion and media attention, as the "constitution
for a new global economy." And, in the same way in which, already for
Marx, market relations provided the true foundation for the notion of
individual freedoms and rights, THIS is also the obverse of the
much-praised new global morality celebrated even by some neoliberal
philosophers as signalling the beginning of the new era in which
international community will establish and enforce some minimal code
preventing sovereign state to engage in crimes against humanity even
within its own territory. And the recent catastrophic economic situation
in Russia, far from being the heritage of old Socialist mismanagement, is
a direct result of this global capitalist logic embodied in MAI.
This other story also has its ominous military side. The ultimate
lesson of the last American military interventions, from the Operation
Desert Fox against Iraq at the end of 1998 to the present bombing of
Yugoslavia, is that they signal a new era in military history - battles in
which the attacking force operates under the constraint that it can
sustain no casualties. When the first stealth-fighter fell down in Serbia,
the emphasis of the American media was that there were no casualties - the
pilot was SAVED! (This concept of "war without casualties" was elaborated
by General Collin Powell.) And was not the counterpoint to it the almost
surreal way CNN reported on the war: not only was it presented as a TV
event, but the Iraqi themselves seem to treat it this way - during the
day, Bagdad was a "normal" city, with people going around and following
their business, as if war and bombardment was an irreal nightmarish
spectre that occurred only during the night and did not take place in
effective reality?
Let us recall what went on in the final American assault on the
Iraqi lines during the Gulf War: no photos, no reports, just rumours that
tanks with bulldozer like shields in front of them rolled over Iraqi
trenches, simply burying thousands of troops in earth and sand - what went
on was allegedly considered too cruel in its shere mechanical efficiency,
too different from the standard notion of a heroic face to face combat, so
that images would perturb too much the public opinion and a total
censorship black-out was stritly imposed. Here we have the two aspects
joined together: the new notion of war as a purely technological event,
taking place behind radar and computer screens, with no casualties, AND
the extreme physical cruelty too unbearable for the gaze of the media -
not the crippled children and raped women, victims of caricaturized local
ethnic "fundamentalist warlords," but thousands of nameless soldiers,
victims of nameless efficient technological warfare. When Jean Baudrillard
made the claim that the Gulf War did not take place, this statement could
also be read in the sense that such traumatic pictures that stand for the
Real of this war were totally censured...
How, then, are we to think these two stories together, without
sacrificing the truth of each of them? What we have here is a political
example of the famous drawing in which we recognize the contours either of
a rabbit head or of a goose head, depending on our mental focus. If we
look at the situation in a certain way, we see the international community
enforcing minimal human rights standards on a nationalist neo-Communist
leader engaged in ethnic cleansing, ready to ruin his own nation just to
retain power. If we shift the focus, we see NATO, the armed hand of the
new capitalist global order, defending the strategic interests of the
capital in the guise of a disgusting travesty, posing as a disinterested
enforcer of human rights, attacking a sovereign country which, in spite of
the problematic nature of its regime, nonetheless acts as an obstacle to
the unbriddled assertion of the New World Order.
However, what if one should reject this double blackmail (if you
are against NATO strikes, you are for Milosevic's proto-Fascist regime of
ethnic cleansing, and if you are against Milosevic, you support the global
capitalist New World Order)? What if this very opposition between
enlightened international intervention against ethnic fundamentalists, and
the heroic last pockets of resistance against the New World Order, is a
false one? What if phenomena like the Milosevic regime are not the
opposite to the New World Order, but rather its SYMPTOM, the place at
which the hidden TRUTH of the New World Order emerges? Recently, one of
the American negotiators said that Milosevic is not only part of the
problem, but rather THE problem itself. However, was this not clear FROM
THE VERY BEGINNING? Why, then, the interminable procrastination of the
Western powers, playing for years into Milosevic's hands, acknowledging
him as a key factor of stability in the region, misreading clear cases of
Serb aggression as civil or even tribal warfare, initially putting the
blame on those who immediately saw what Milosevic stands for and, for that
reason, desperately wanted to escape his grasp (see James Baker's public
endorsement of a "limited military intervention" against Slovene
secession), supporting the last Yugoslav prime minister Ante Markovic,
whose program was, in an incredible case of political blindness, seriously
considered as the last chance for a democratic market-oriented unified
Yugoslavia, etc.etc.? When the West fights Milosevic, it is NOT fighting
its enemy, one of the last points of resistance against the
liberal-democratic New World Order; it is rather fighting its own
creature, a monster that grew as the result of the compromises and
inconsistencies of the Western politics itself. (And, incidentally, it is
the same as with Iraq: its strong position is also the result of the
American strategy of containing Iran.)
So, precisely as a Leftist, my answer to the dilemma "Bomb or
not?" is: not yet ENOUGH bombs, and they are TOO LATE. In the last decade,
the West followed a Hamlet-like procrastination towards Balkan, and the
present bombardment has effectively all the signs of Hamlet's final
murderous outburst in which a lot of people unnecessarily die (not only
the King, his true target, but also his mother, Laertius, Hamlet
himelf...), because Hamlet acted too late, when the proper moment was
already missed. So the West, in the present intervention which displays
all the signs of a violent outburst of impotent aggressivity without a
clear political goal, is now paying the price for the years of
entertaining illusions that one can make a deal with Milosevic: with the
recent hesitations about the ground intervention in Kosovo, the Serbian
regime is, under the pretext of war, launching the final assault on Kosovo
and purge it of most of the Albanians, cynically accepting bombardments as
the price to be paid. When the Western forces repeat all the time that
they are not fighting the Serbian people, but only their corrupted regime,
they rely on the typically liberal wrong premise that the Serbian people
are just victims of their evil leadership personified in Milosevic,
manipulated by him. The painful fact is that Serb aggressive nationalism
enjoys the support of the large majority of the population - no, Serbs are
not passive victims of nationalist manipulation, they are not Americans in
disguise, just waiting to be delivered from the bad nationalist spell.
More precisely, the misperception of the West is double: this
notion of the bad leadership manipulating the good people is accompanied
by the apparently contradictory notion according to which, Balkan people
are living in the past, fighting again old battles, perceiving recent
situation through old myths... One is tempted to say that these two
notions should be precisely TURNED AROUND: not only are people not "good,"
since they let themselves be manipulated with obscene pleasure; there are
also no "old myths" which we need to study if we are really to understand
the situation, just the PRESENT outburst of racist nationalism which,
according to its needs, opportunistically resuscitates old myths...
So, on the one hand, we have the obscenities of the Serb state
propaganda: they regularily refer to Clinton not as "the American
president," but as "the American Fuehrer"; two of the transparents on
their state-organized anti-Nato demonstrations were "Clinton, come here
and be our Monica!" (i.e. suck our...), and "Monica, did you suck out also
his brain?". The atmosphere in Belgrade is, at least for the time being,
carnavalesque in a faked way - when they are not in shelters, people dance
to rock or ethnic music on the streets, under the motto "With poetry and
music against bombs!", playing the role of the defying heroes (since they
know that NATO does not really bomb civilian targets and that,
consequently, they are safe!). This is where the NATO planners got it
wrong, caught in their schemes of strategic reasoning, unable to forecast
that the Serb reaction to bombardment will be a recourse to a collective
Bakhtinian carnivalization of the social life... This pseudo-authentic
spectacle, although it may fascinate some confused Leftists, is
effectively the other, public, face of ethnic cleansing: in Belgrade
people are defiantly dancing on the streets while, three hundred
kilometers to the South, a genocide of African proportions is taking
place... And the Western counterpoint to this obscenity is the more and
more openly racist tone of its reporting: when the three American soldiers
were taken prisoners, CNN dedicated the first 10 minutes of the News to
their predicament (although everyone knew that NOTHING will happen to
them!), and only then reported on the tens of thousands of refugees,
burned villages and Pristina turning into a ghost town. Where is the
so-much-praised Serb "democratic opposition" to protest THIS horror taking
place in their own backyard, not only the - till now, at least,
bombardments with relatively very low casualties?
In the recent struggle of the so-called "democratic opposition" in
Serbia against the Milosevic's regime, the truly touchy topic is the
stance towards Kosovo: as to this topic, the large majority of the
"democratic opposition" unconditionally endorses Milosevic's anti-Albanian
nationalist agenda, even accusing him of making compromises with the West
and "betraying" Serb national interests in Kosovo. In the course of the
student demonstrations against the Milosevic's Socialist Party
falsification of the election results in the Winter of 1996, the Western
media who closely followed the events and praised the revived democratic
spirit in Serbia, rarely mentioned the fact that one of the regular
slogans of the demonstrators against the special police forces was
"Instead of kicking us, go to Kosovo and kick out the Albanians!". In
today's Serbia, the absolute sine qua non of an authentic political act
would thus be to unconditionally reject the ideological topos of the
"Albanian threat to Serbia."
One thing is for sure: the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia will
change the global geopolitic coordinates. The unwritten pact of peaceful
coexistence (the respect of each state's full sovereignty, i.e.
non-interference in internal affairs, even in the case of the grave
violation of human rights) is over. However, the very first act of the new
global police force usurping the right to punish sovereign states for
their wrongdoings already signals its end, its own undermining, since it
immediately became clear that this universality of human rights as its
legitimization is false, i.e. that the attacks on selective targets
protect particular interests. The NATO bombardments of Yugoslavia also
signal the end of any serious role of UN and Security Council: it is NATO
under US guidance that effectively pulls the strings. Furthermore, the
silent pact with Russia that held till now is broken: in the terms of this
pact, Russia was publicly treated as a superpower, allowed to maintain the
appearance of being one, on condition that it did not effectively act as
one. Now Russia's humiliation is open, any pretense of dignity is
unmasked: Russia can only openly resist or openly comply with Western
pressure. The further logical result of this new situation will be, of
course, the renewed rise of anti-Western resistance from Eastern Europe to
the Third World, with the sad consequence that criminal figures like
Milosevic will be elevated into the model fighters against the New World
Order.
So the lesson is that the alternative between the New World Order
and the neoracist nationalists opposing it is a false one: these are the
two sides of the same coin - the New World Order itself breeds
monstrosities that it fights. Which is why the protests against bombing
from the reformed Communist parties all around Europe, inclusive of PDS,
are totally misdirected: these false protesters against the NATO
bombardment of Serbia are like the caricaturized pseudo-Leftists who
oppose the trial against a drug dealer, claiming that his crime is the
result of social pathology of the capitalist system. The way to fight the
capitalist New World Order is not by supporting local proto-Fascist
resistances to it, but to focus on the only serious question today: how to
build TRANSNATIONAL political movements and institutions strong enough to
seriously constraint the unlimited rule of the capital, and to render
visible and politically relevant the fact that the local fundamentalist
resistances against the New World Order, from Milosevic to le Pen and the
extreme Right in Europe, are part of it?